THE EMPIRE OF STATE CULTURE

I would like to highlight that this paper was written in November 1996, in Beijing. However, despite of growing globalization, developing of civil society and a dynamic interaction among countries, issues regarding to the role of national State in today’s world -twenty years later- remain invariable, although there are much to do on poverty eradication, gender equality and local development. Therefore, I publish it again with no changes.

It is a common knowledge that modernity was an effect of WWII, that the triumph over Germany National–Socialism meant the liberation from fascist domination, and that this freedom —which we now enjoy supposedly—, is owed to the victorious powers led by the United States of America.

Let us consider some more profound questions. The main problem can be established at the economic level. The European struggle for markets had left Germany out of race (now, it’s however the leading market at the European level). This nation, after suffering a humiliating defeat at WWI, tenaciously pursued its revenge, aiming at the economic capacity of all the adversaries that would block its advance.

The construction of the idea of nation was completed with the ideologization of the State. National–Socialism founded its power structure on the archaic idea of the “superior race” (now, ethnic origin) with the real goal of expanding its territorial domains. The figure of Hitler, its leader, was divinized, and the State acquired the organic representation of nationalism. Hitler meant for contemporary world the first full–blown expression of State power.

After the defeat of National-Socialism, the victorious nations imposed on the world their distribution of economic and political spheres of influence. Roosevelt’s Welfare State scheme was the reactive answer to the divinized power incarnated in Hitler’s State; and, in the East, the Stalin’s totalitarian State was only the complete absorption of the individual citizens into an absolute paternalistic and dominant structure. East and West were equalized on regard to this conception of State, in spite of the insistence of capitalist ideology on the mythological difference between the two hemispheres.

Once the distribution of the world was accomplished, State power was increased with the arms race, and it reached its extreme top with the Cold War. The USA managed to supersede other states, and reached world hegemony even before the Soviet Union collapsed under its own internal contradictions.

With the political hegemony of the USA and the subordination of all countries to the international division of labor, the powers’ circuit was established among the US, Europe and Japan (but, later on, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, or the so-called Asian tigers). China and Russia were always forces of the old order, but potentially capable of destabilizing this power structure. The other countries “do not count”. The dictatorships in the rest of the world have also little importance, if they do not pose any threat to regional stability, mainly in relation to the continued economic dominance of those three power centers. Dictatorship in some countries had also an advantage, additionally and in last analysis, the secondary advantage of facilitating the role of defenders of freedom and human rights attributed to the states constituted under the rules of democracy. Nevertheless, freedom and the rights pertaining to democracy are, in fact, universal, and its application was a general principle in the world even before the constitution of the present culture.

In this world context, the State is the only valid interlocutor on regard to other states. The people and the nations are absorbed into this dynamism. Conceptually, and by the way of electoral democracy, we understand that the State represents the citizens which compose the nation. It is assumed that citizens elect their State leaders in order to represent their interests. The historical truth is, nevertheless, that these leaders do not constitute any representation of citizens’ interests, but the interests of the State bureaucracy. The US citizen, for example, knows that the State doesn’t solve his/her problems. Up today, for him/her, it makes no sense to participate in the electoral process (the number of American citizens participating in the national polls does not surpass 25 percent of the potential voting population).

The US citizens have basically broken with the paternal complex, and this breakdown is expressed through a constant homage to aggression. In the American society, the function of the State is mainly oriented toward balancing the forces coming, on the one hand, from transnational corporations and, on the other hand, from the Pentagon. These two forces sustain the US State role. Meanwhile, the citizen have since long ago their own economic and civilian dynamic.

The pattern of dissociation between State and citizens invariably appears in every country. Under the pretext of national security, the power of imposition of the state force is increased without limits. Behind this foundation one can see the fact that the State has deviated from the goals it was conceived to achieve. The State does not defend the citizens, nor does it provide for common welfare. On the contrary, it extracts wealth from the citizens and extorts them using all kinds of procedures and regulations. It exert influence on their minds with repetitive and backward educational methods. It doesn’t open the ground for new opportunities of achievements for citizens, and it only expects a positive response from external and superior powers.

The citizens, whom the State should correspond to, are disqualified by the State, and, while proceeds to undermine and debilitate citizens will, a network of corruption grows in its own structure. State corruption is only the result of narcissistic divinization of the State, whose only purpose is to represent itself and its greed. To achieve this, its approach to citizenship is functional to the need of keeping a faithful electorate. Enormous sectors of society remain for decades in conditions of backwardness and are forgotten by the political sphere. Their existence acquires importance only during electoral campaigns. Only then, the political sphere casts its gaze on these sectors with the aim of establishing a symbol that will capture their imagination, in order to cultivate the illusion that their backwardness and isolation will be eliminated with a new government.

The political left erected its movement precisely starting from these backward sectors of society, but its supposed goal of social change, with the proposal of a new social model, meant only a change in the political sphere, while marginality, isolation and degradation continued to reign as before without any improvement.

State culture did not see any danger for its foundations with the expansion of the socialist movement. This was because the ideological conception of socialism is basically statist: The State must solve all problems of the nation. The national character is fused together with the role of the State. The State culture did not have any problem, therefore, in allowing certain sectors of the population to “entertain” socialist ideologies, in the same way as it allowed socialism to coexist with the more conservative ideologies of society.

History has certified, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the power of State culture is guaranteed, and that the leftist ideologies have to succumb under the reinforcement of State power.

The truth is that the State has crowned itself as the guardian of culture and civilization. The State, independently of its capitalist or socialist value, has no other destiny than the conservation of the status quo. In order to do this, it necessarily has to use the power of authority, the power of force, the power of weapons, the power of law and regulations, the monopoly of land, and above all, economic monopoly. In the last analysis, the State enacts real power. Its legitimacy is affirmed on the ground of its capacity of intervening into all spheres of civil life. The State, therefore, has no interest in answering or responding to the power of ideas.

To counter the power of the state culture, it must be applied three conditions: (a) poverty eradication, (b) develop or strengthen gender equality, and (b) driving local and county development. These issues will be published soon.